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Seal Hits the Beach in Upper Manhattan

By Corey Kilgannon May 4, 2011 7:52 pmMay 4, 2011 7:52 pm

Corey Kilgannon/The New York TimesApparently healthy, but not feeling particularly social.

Update, 10:04 a.m. Thursday | The seal was still on the beach as of 10 a.m. Thursday, the city parks department said, and still appears healthy and normal. “We have some rangers out there monitoring it but nothing’s really changed,” a parks spokeswoman said.

At some point late Wednesday afternoon, a seal made its way out of the Hudson River and onto a small beach on the west side of upper Manhattan, at the western end of Dyckman Street.

The seal had a light gray coat with dark spots. It lay on the sand near some graffitied rocks and growled and thumped the sand whenever photographers drew too close.

It attracted no small number of onlookers, and the police officers who showed up were rather nonchalant. They were told by biologists that the animal was probably healthy and would return to the water on its own.

Back at the beach, Zohar Lindenbaum, 43, a photographer, was jogging by when he saw the seal. He cursed himself for forgetting his camera.

“I have a professional camera, and I carry it all the time,” he said. “And the one time I don’t have it, I see a seal.”

Update Rob DiGiovanni, director of the Riverhead Foundation, a marine animal rescue group, said on Wednesday night that his staff was keeping tabs on the condition of the seal -– a gray seal, he said –- through the Parks Department’s Urban Park Rangers, and that it seemed that the seal was healthy and “seems to be just hanging out on the beach, which is normal behavior, even in a heavily populated area.”

“The Urban Park Rangers will let us know if there’s any change, and then we’d initiate response and bring the animal back to the foundation,” Mr. DiGiovanni said.

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